Narnia, cont'd

Just a couple more views and reflections:

Easily Distracted has a great post about the hype, "Unbelief and Imagination", which clears some things up:

What makes Lewis relatively innocent, even of the (fairly indisputable) charge that his depiction of pseudo-Muslims practically oozes racism and condescension, is the simultaneous strangeness and typicality of his fantasy, that it contains so many familiar elements, the grammar of the genre and its folkloric roots mixed in with so many eccentrically composed or combined gestures of religious teaching. It takes a meanness of spirit to read Narnia as outrageous theological or cultural error, just as it would to read Wind in the Willows and complain that it was a polemic on behalf of English social hierarchy.

There is also a brief review of the film, with which I mostly concur, in the "Pop Culture Roundup".

(I am rather into Easily Distracted lately, not least of all because of the recent article "Should You Go to Graduate School?", which is striking a particularly large nerve.)

Finally, Fantastic Planet points out, tongue in cheek, that "Narnia is Satanic, too!"

Don’t worry, Narnia fans. Even though the Narnia chronicles are already being excoriated for being a thinly-veiled Christian parable, like in this article by the excruciatingly smug Polly Toynbee, many pastors would like to remind us that no, the Narnia books are not Christian. They are indeed, like the Harry Potter books, an open door to WITCHERY AND BADNESS!

Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

As I mentioned in the comments to my earlier Narnia post, the biggest problem with the new film isn't that it's Christian or satanic or racist or backward or patronizing or proselytizing or insensitive...it's that it's Disney and bland. That's it, really. I wish someone would do something about that.